


Eyes That Know

by nagi_schwarz



Series: The Oppenheimer Effect [46]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, Crossover, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-18
Updated: 2016-06-18
Packaged: 2018-07-15 17:32:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7232029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the comment_fic prompt: "Stargate Multiverse, Evan Lorne +/ Any, <i>Starry, starry night / Paint your palette blue and gray / Look out on a summer's day / With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.</i>"</p><p>Natalia Lorne asks her brother a question that he doesn't answer, but she learns what she needed to know anyway. Natalia POV.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eyes That Know

“Who is JD, really?” Natalia asked.  
  
Evan glanced over his shoulder. “Jonathan Daniel Nealson.” He kept on painting.  
  
Natalia couldn’t remember the last time Evan had painted a portrait that wasn’t a commission. JD was stunning, though. Everyone in Evan’s house was, each in his own way. If Natalia were more pop-culture savvy, she’d make a joke about frat houses or boybands or something, but the frivolities of the outside world had always come second to her family and her art. Evan’s ability to work from memory was patently unfair, but he had a photo tacked to the easel above the canvas, of JD wearing nothing but a pair of jeans and laced-up combat boots and crouched against a tree, lips parted, sweat sheening his skin. He looked tired but pleased and was fiddling with a pair of sunglasses. He looked damn good, and also a hell of a lot like jailbait.  
  
“What’s this picture from?”  
  
“We went hiking,” Evan said. He was mixing paint fastidiously.  
  
“He’s beautiful,” Natalia said.  
  
“They all are.”  
  
Of course Evan didn’t include himself. Natalia resisted the urge to roll her eyes, but then she was distracted by the blue Evan was dabbing onto JD’s jeans.  
  
“He looks great in this picture,” Natalia said, “but it’s - incomplete.”  
  
“I didn’t ask him to take off his shirt - it was hot that day.” Evan slewed her a look. “And I’m not painting one onto him.”  
  
She gave in to the urge to roll her eyes. “That’s not what I meant. In person, sometimes, he gets this look in his eyes. Distant. Deep. Full of shadows. Like he’s so much older than he is.”  
  
Evan’s hand stilled for a moment. “He’s been through a lot.”  
  
“You’ve been through a lot.”  
  
“He understands that.”  
  
“Better than Cam?” Natalia couldn’t imagine letting herself be hurtled through the air at multiple times the speed of sound. Couldn’t imagine that speed behind her as she was pointed straight at the earth. Couldn’t imagine feeling her own body break and being forced to lie in the wreckage of the thing that had tried to kill her for hours till emergency medical services found her.  
  
Cam hadn’t told the story like that. All he’d said was he’d been flying an experimental classified craft and it had crashed, and that was that.  
  
_That_ was the loss of his legs.  
  
“Differently than Cam,” Evan said. “Cam went through horrible physical and mental trauma. As did John. As did I. As did JD.”  
  
“But not Rodney?”  
  
“It sounds like growing up McKay was a special war all its own.” Evan resumed painting.  
  
“How can you continue to work for the government, knowing what it did to a kid like JD?”  
  
Evan slewed her another dark look. “Do you really think JD’s much of a kid?”  
  
“No, he’s not.” Natalia lifted her chin. “But he should’ve had the chance to be one.”  
  
“What childhood he had was happy,” Evan said. “Sledding in the snows of Minnesota, playing catch with his dad in the summers, riding his bicycle wherever he wanted. Fishing with his grandfather. Singing to his mother’s old records.”  
  
“But was his happiness overshadowed by what they did to him?”  
  
Evan sighed and set down his palette. Natalia went to apologize for ruining his art flow, but she saw that he was just out of paintbrushes and needed to clean them before he proceeded. He was always so meticulous about that sort of thing. There was a reason he was the only person in the history of ever who was allowed to borrow Mom’s paintbrushes.  
  
“He’s capable of empathy and love,” Evan said. “Whatever they did to him, they never took that from him.”  
  
Natalia studied her brother. “Does he make you happy?”  
  
Evan’s smile chased away all the shadows in his eyes - the same shadows JD had in his eyes. “Every day.”  
  
Evan hadn’t answered Natalia’s initial question - there was much more to JD than met the eye - but she didn’t mind, because Evan had answered the question that really mattered, and she knew he really was happy.

**Author's Note:**

> Evan's painting based on [this](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v368/Asia_Kash/richard_dean_anderson-very-young.jpg) picture of a young RDA.


End file.
